The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The most scandalous Anne Morrow Lindbergh quotes that are glad to read
It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.
The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient.
One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach - waiting for a gift from the sea.
By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.
The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient.
To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach - waiting for a gift from the sea.
Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack.
Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.
I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches.
If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable.
I feel we are all islands - in a common sea.
My passport photo is one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever seen- no retouching, no shadows, no flattery-just stark me.
We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships.
We leap at the flow of time and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom.
When I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.
Don't wish me happiness - I don't expect to be happy it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor - I will need them all.
Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.
Those fields of daisies we landed on, and dusty fields and desert stretches.
Memories of many skies and earths beneath us - many days, many nights of stars.
Geniuses were like storms or cyclones, pulling everything into their path, sticks and stones and dust.
When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too.
If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others. Only when one is connected to one's own core is.
Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
Only love can be divided endlessly and still not diminish.
For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.
The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was, nor forward to what it might be, but living in the present and accepting it as it is now.
...the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom. The only real security is... living in the present and accepting it as it is now.
Everything today has been heavy and brown. Bring me a Unicorn to ride about the town.
The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere.
That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.
Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.
When you love someone you do not love them, all the time, in the exact same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships.
Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - like writing a poem or saying a prayer.
If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.
Flying was a very tangible freedom. In those days, it was beauty, adventure, discovery - the epitome of breaking into new worlds.
One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach.
One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.
One learns first of all in beach living the art of shedding;
how little one can get along with, not how much.
Perhaps middle-age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells;
the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego.
The web of marriage is made by propinquity, in the day to day living side by side, looking outward in the same direction. It is woven in space and in time of the substance of life itself.
The world has different owners at sunrise.
.. Even your own garden does not belong to you. Rabbits and blackbirds have the lawns; a tortoise-shell cat who never appears in daytime patrols the brick walls, and a golden-tailed pheasant glints his way through the iris spears.
Nothing feeds the center of being so much as creative work.
The curtain of mechanization has come down between the mind and the hand.
Forsythia is pure joy. There is not an ounce, not a glimmer of sadness or even knowledge in forsythia. Pure, undiluted, untouched joy.
To give without any reward, or any notice, has a special quality of its own.
Flowers always have it - poise, completion, fulfillment, perfection . . .
When we start at the center of ourselves, we discover something worthwhile extending toward the periphery of the circle. We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here, some of the love in me and thee which go to make up the kingdom of heaven on earth.
For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into;
daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.
the final lesson of learning to be independent - widowhood ... is the hardest lesson of all.
there is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change.
I have been overcome by the beauty and richness of our life together, those early mornings setting out, those evenings gleaming with rivers and lakes below us, still holding the last light.
# "I saw the most beautiful cat today.
It was sitting by the side of the road, its two front feet neatly and graciously together. Then it gravely swished around its tail to completely encircle itself. It was so fit and beautifully neat, that gesture, and so self-satisfied, so complacent.
I must write it all out, at any cost.
Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.
Love is a force. . . . It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product. It is a power, like money, or steam or electricity. It is valueless unless you can give something else by means of it.
The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.
Perhaps I am a bear, or some hibernating animal underneath, for the instinct to be half asleep all winter is so strong in me.
I believe that true identity is found .
. . in creative activity springing from within. It is found, paradoxically, when one loses oneself. Woman can best refind herself in some kind of creative activity of her own.